Sit up with the soles of your feet flat on the floor. Hook your hands behind your hamstrings and lean back slowly until you are balancing up on your sit bones. Lift your feet off of the ground and, with bent knees, raise your feet up, so they are aligned with your knees. Press your lower back in and extend your chest up to the sky. Release your hands from behind your hamstrings and reach your arms out in front of you, palms facing together. Make sure you keep pressing your shoulders down, pressing your lower back in and extending your heart up. Hold the pose for 5 breaths. Advanced practitioners can extend their legs straight, making a “V” shape.

Developed by the professionals at Positive Performance, the BRAVR™ Method is an easy, five-minute, five-step solution to getting athletes in the right mental space to achieve top performance. The five steps create the BRAVR™ acronym: Breathe, Release, Affirmation, Visualization, and Reset word.

(1) Pitch faster and throw harder
(2) Swing the bat harder and hit the ball further
(3) Steal more bases
(4) Get better jumps off the bases
(5) Explode out of the batter's box
(6) Run down more balls in the field
(7) Reach, stretch and get more of those "oh-so-close" balls
(8) React faster
(9) Have more stamina for long games and tournaments
(10) Stay healthy and avoid injuries
(11) Tolerate heat better and perform when it's really hot
(12) Practice longer without being tired or losing your focus
(13) Be much more consistent and have less "ups and downs"
(14) Get it faster when learning or refining a skill because of increased body awareness
(15) Be much more confident and feel stronger
(16) Be mentally tougher
(17) Get more extra bases when running
(18) Develop an athletic body
(19) Recover faster between innings and games
(20) Be more dominant in all aspects of the game

Don't you think it's time to be much more serious about your conditioning and train like the best players in the world do?

They’re called cutesy names such as muffin tops and love handles, but let’s
face it, no one loves the roll of flab that pops over the waistband of your
jeans and ruins the sleek line of fitness clothes, clingy sweaters, and
tailored shirts.

“Love handles are one of the most common reasons people exercise and hire a personal
trainer,” observes certified trainer Jason Keigher
CSCS, CPT, who works with clients in New York City. It’s often after an ab workout consisting of thousands of crunches that
frustration finally leads people to get help from a fitness
pro.

“Most people think that doing crunches will get rid of love
handles, but they are misinformed,” Keigher says.
When done properly, crunches do tone muscles, but the problem is, love handles don’t contain an ounce of muscle. They're
fat, and to burn fat you need a healthy diet and a rigorous cardiovascular
program, he explains.

Work your body correctly, and you
will certainly see results, says Sylvia Nasser, a certified personal trainer on
Long Island, N.Y. Read on to learn how to trim the fat.

Although I’m a bit obsessed with
following trends, basically I’m a traditional gal. When it comes to choosing powerhouse
foods to feed my family, I’m not looking for something that will be hot on the
plate today and passé tomorrow; I want foods I can count on every day. Many
health professionals have their own lists
of the foods they believe to have the most healing powers, and if you put
each list side-by-side, some foods would even overlap. For the most part, there
are certain foods that truly stand out from the rest.

Those are the foods that are superfoods; healthy picks that are packed with...

Sweet but
with a lemony finish. Crisp, tangy to the point of tartness. Spicy
and fragrant. No, we’re not discussing the merits of fine wines. We’re
talking apples!

October is National Apple Month, the
time to celebrate the glory of the fruit, as the nation has been doing since
1904 when National Apple Week was born. In 1996, October became National
Apple Month.

Domesticated some four thousand
years ago in the fruity forests of what is now Kazakhstan, apples
became a part of the human diet a long time ago. With flavors shaped by
their respective climates — the shorter the growing season the tarter the fruit
— apples have been grown across the United States for centuries. But
not until the last few decades, starting in the 1980s,have apple
breeders offered such a variety and explosion of flavors: Fuji, Gala, Pink Lady,
Honeycrisp, SweeTango, and
many more. Remember when there were only a few like
Red Delicious or Golden Delicious or McIntosh to be found in grocery stores?

But the history and diversity of
apples is not the only thing to celebrate. Apples also can be credited with...

A great softball players needs a strong group of core muscles. These muscles are used in every aspect of the game for a player. The core muscles are the muscle in and around the belly button.

The following video is a simple 10 minute series of core exercises. Do them every day until there seems to be no challenge from them. Once you reach that point, you still need to keep focus on your core muscles but with different exercises and more of an every other day routine.

Sudden deaths among young people who complete in athletics are terrible and tragic events. In the October 2014 issue of the journal JACC, many of the world experts in this area released a consensus statement to provide guidelines on when to screen for heart disease, in order to avoid this tragedy.

Fortunately, such events are rare. However, they are devastating and are often covered broadly in the news. Unfortunately, sudden death can occur at any time and often without warning even after years of athletic participation. As a parent of children participating in sports, these news reports occur too often and touch me on a personal level. I suspect they do most who read them.

I have had the pleasure of knowing Danny Berger. Danny came from a family of parents and siblings who all played college athletics. He grew up as an exceptional athlete and excelled at basketball. At over six feet six inches tall, he was highly recruited to play college basketball. He played at the collegiate level for two years and improved yearly in all phases of the game. He entered his junior year with anticipation to contribute significantly to a Utah State University (USU) basketball team that perennially wins over 20 games a year.